The California Office to Reform Education, a group of nine California school districts, including LAUSD, met with federal officials this week to make a last pitch for a No Child Left Behind waiver, which would exempt those districts from meeting certain requirements. One little wrinkle though: last Friday, a group of nine teachers unions, including California Teachers...

Newly elected School Board member Monica Ratliff sat down with Warren Olney yesterday on KCRW’s Which Way, LA?. You can listen below, the interview starts at around the 8:45 mark: Some highlights: On why she voted for Dr. Richard Vladovic for School Board President: “The two nominees were Tamar [Galatzan] and Richard. And I asked...

Arts education is making a comeback in LA Unified classrooms thanks to a new, five-year plan unveiled today by the LAUSD Arts Education Branch. The report, known as “The Arts Education and Cultural Network Plan:  2012-2017,”  promises to infuse core curriculum with artistic elements. “Arts education at the LAUSD was decimated during the recent budget...

“Dear Mayor of Los Angeles,” Educators 4 Excellence writes in the introduction of a new report that contends LAUSD’s most effective teachers don’t have enough leadership opportunities to keep them in their classrooms. The new report, STEP: Supporting Teachers as Empowered Professionals, aims to reverse L.A. Unified’s high turnover rate, close to 50 percent according...

Just shy of our first anniversary, LA School Report has been named a finalist for Best Political Blog in LA Weekly’s 2013 Web Awards. We think we are the best, but we need votes to make it happen. So click here to jump into the voting booth – scroll down to category No. 11 and...

As reported yesterday in LA School Report, LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy and others are in Washington today, making a final push to persuade the Obama Education Department to approve its revised application for a waiver from No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2002 federal education law. Superintendent Deasy has said that a NCLB waiver would free up...

Pressed for time, a small group of superintendents and officials from a coalition of nine California school districts, representing 1.1 million students, are on their way to D.C. to ensure that its No Child Left Behind waiver proposal is passed in time for the upcoming school year. Representatives from the California Office to Reform Education...

This is an oped describing how layoffs of teachers in recent years have created a paradoxical situation in which there will soon be teacher shortages, penned by UC Riverside interim Dean of Education Douglas E Mitchell in yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News: “The looming shortage is the result of massive teacher layoffs resulting from California’s budget...